Recursive and Non-Recursive Network Coding: Performance and Complexity
Jean-Pierre Thibault, Wai-Yip Chan, Shahram Yousefi · 2007
While network coding promises to increase throughput, network nodes incur increased complexity as they are relied on to perform packet mixing. Previous works have proposed to manage network-level complexity by reducing the number of network coding transport nodes. Here, we study the tradeoff between transport-node complexity and achievable throughput rates. We compare two encoding schemes: recursive and non-recursive. We show that due to the peculiarities of network coding, non-recursive coding achieves considerably higher rates, for comparable computational and storage requirements. We also show that by replacing multiplication with shifting, complexity is further reduced, with negligible impact on performance.